I can’t even log into Overwatch, because the battle.net launcher thinks the game is up to date but it hasn’t updated to the Ashe patch yet. So, when I try to launch the game it can’t connect to a game server at all.
Which also means I can’t run any tests in game. 
I don’t know if this is a coincidence or not but i got the PSE server IPs from the in game netrgraph and blocked them in Windows Firewall with an inbound and outbound rule.
Was getting PSE servers every second game now i haven’t had one in over 20 games. Like i said i may just be getting realllllly lucky atm though.
Alrighty, we did alot different tests and monitored the connection for the past hour.
Out of the 390k packets total sent, only 6 were ever dropped (4 were by et-0-0-48-br01-eqsy4.as57976. net, 2 by unknown.telstraglobal. net).
No other issues or big spikes seen anywhere over my ISP’s network or my route to the Sydney AWS (SYD2 data center).
For what it’s worth I’m told my connection to PSE1/LAX1 servers are also as good as they can be, with suprisingly 0 packet loss despite being on the other side of the planet.
He then remoted in and installed wireshark and did some more tests.
On game startup the client connected to 11 total IP addresses and chatted/pinged with them over 5ish seconds.
These included the SYD2 data center IP 37.244.42.0/24 and US Central 24.105.62.0/24.
It’s highly likely this is the ping test for the matchmaker to see what server best suits.
And then? Nothing.
My client never once talks to the SYD2 data center or any instance/‘subnet’ of it ever again, not until actually entering the server when a match pops (The actual loading screen).
Pre-joining PSE1 or LAX1, no packets are sent or recieved over any protocol to test my connection against SYD2 beforehand.
We tried: Entering/exiting queue, creating custom lobby, joining/leaving a group, return to lobby after game end, left game at main menu for over an hour and repeated.
I would love someone to explain to me why tests like WinMTR to see personal connection stabilty are at all relevant to this issue when the game client itself isn’t even testing against the actual data center it intends to connect too? Stable connection or not, it’s irrelevant to where its putting me if it’s using a snapshot from when game first launched and has put me on several SYD2 sessions beforehand?
An interesting fact he also brought up was that when placed on a foreign server, it’s always a full lobby of au/nz people.
This actually suggests the matchmaker is infact working correctly, as it’s finding and grouping people from the same region correctly without issues before match start.
However for whatever reason it’s not starting the match with the group it’s made on SYD2, instead it looks like it’s using whatever else is available.
Further suggesting the fault actually lies with the SYD2 data center itself.
Heyo, do we have an update on whats going on???
would be good to see how things are progressing
Worked for me aswell.
That is a lot of testing, very interesting.
If I understand correctly from one of the reps, the SYD2 servers actually do the stability checking hence why you don’t see any connections in wireshark.
One complex part of the internet is that just because my route to 37.244.4X.X is a particular route doesn’t mean the route from 37.244.4X.X is the same. This means the stability issue isn’t necessarily a fault with the datacenters, instead it’s likely a fault of a third party peer.
In saying that although in general it’s not a problem but I would personally say it is a flawed system for the same problem we are having now. I’d be happy to be corrected if any of this is wrong though.
Hmm, as in it health checks itself and tells the matchmaker ‘I have a problem, go away’?
If it were to ping or test against someones game client shouldn’t that show up on the persons end under source?
Honestly not sure and I could be completely wrong about it, just from your information and a few things said it seems to be the logical conclusion.
It’s possible that parts of the routes are tested for multiple players to reduce the bandwidth in checking instead of the game client itself.
Or maybe it just does the check as OW starts and after each game like WyomingMyst suggested
Nice idea. Will give it a go.
I have played 50+ games since blocking them and haven’t had a server other than SYD. I did get my first LAX server yesterday but i blocked that IP as well and haven’t had one since.
I have been full degen, playing all day and haven’t seen any PSE or LAX.
Sounds great.
I haven’t blocked anything and have only had games on SYD2 for the last few hours. Wonder if it’s been fixed for now?
Does anyone have any idea of a fix for console? This only started happening with the update. I cannot imagine how long this has been happening for PC, but this game is just so unplayable with constant 350 ping.
You will probably have to wait for a update from support, console can’t really do much other then wait or have the ISP block the routes.
Part of this is to be expected as the Matchmaker lives in NA. However you’d expect to see at least one ping test to SYD2, right? For it to “check connectivity”.
Blizzard will never go into how this works in depth, though.
Hey all,
We did some tweaks last night to see if we could help. Sounds like you’re still having trouble. At this time, please keep the winMTRs coming just in case we need more.
In the mean time, has anyone noticed any improvement at all? Less games on the wrong server, for instance? We currently agree with you all that it is not a routing issue. Routing wise your connection looks fine, so we’re unravelling what we might be able to do to help with the priority.
Here’s what we need for further reports. As long as you’re still having this problem, feel free to keep these coming. We’ll use them to keep the server/network folks updated.
We appreciate all the patience and help throughout this process. Work for issues like this can sometimes take a while, but the info you all are providing helps us rule things out more quickly.
As of last game, the latency issue started on console when the new update came out. I yet to still test it out since you have replied.
The issue doesn’t happen at all during the day. It’s currently 10am so we can’t really give you feedback until tonight (About 10ish hours from now).
Okay y’all, more requests for info for tonight once the issues normally happen. There was some unrelated server weirdness last night during/following the patch, so the data we collected last night isn’t super helpful. Basically when we swap patches, we deploy the patches server-by-server so there’s as little interruption as possible, which means that sometimes folks will end up in the wrong server irrespective of what the ‘best match’ is.
In addition, there was an issue for PS4 Players causing some of you to have issues connecting to the correct server. That should be fixed, but I made a thread for it anyway just in case!
With all that in mind, we need to check again tonight, and I’m going to shuffle us into multiple threads so we can track the scope of impact of each theory we have separately and see what we’re actually looking at. Keep in mind that just because we lock a thread doesn’t mean we “forget” all the other posts - this is just to make sure we’re collecting information as efficiently as possible with as little “noise” as possible from unrelated issues. I’m going to be locking this thread and moving us into different threads which I have just created. To figure out which situation is right for you, you will need to use the Network Graph while in a game with weird network errors.